Neil Marshall is back to the horror genre. This time around he will be Executive Producer, overseeing the directorial debut of Craig Conway – Little Red. Conway worked with Marshall on The Descent, Dog Soldiers and Doomsday.
Little Red is currently in pre-production. It is said to be a low-budget horror and a contemporary reimagining of the Little Red Riding Hood folk story. It follows a fifteen-year-old girl who unravels the dark secrets in her family.
The script is by Peter Stylianou and the cinematographer Daniel Patrick Vaughan will also produce alongside Paul Murray.
The original story actually traces its origins back to stories from classical Greece and Rome, such as a local legend recounted by Pausanias in which, each year, a virgin girl was offered to a malevolent spirit dressed in the skin of a wolf, who raped the girl.
This then evolved into several pre-17th-century European folk tales, some of which are forever intertwined with Eastern European and Germanic werewolf legends.
The story has varied considerably in different versions over the centuries, translations, and as the subject of numerous modern adaptations. Eventually, two different versions were written by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm and have, over time, become amalgamated.
Elements of the legend made it into The Company of Wolves, a 1984 British gothic fantasy horror film directed by Neil Jordan that starred Angela Lansbury and David Warner.
No release date is yet known for Little Red.